


Dreamcatcher

by Mortior



Series: Twenty Red Lights [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Blood, Death Threats, Depression, Dream Bubbles, Dubious Consent, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Guardiancest, Implied Relationships, Incest, Injury, M/M, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Past Underage Sex, Short Chapters (Usually), Stridercest - Freeform, alpha stridercest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-27 08:48:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortior/pseuds/Mortior
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the void between sessions, where the dead wander and the living dream in memories, two alternate iterations of the same family make contact with disastrous consequences, and Dave finds out the hard way that some memories are meant to stay private. Who knew switching roles could lead to such different relationships.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Disorient

**Author's Note:**

> This will have many more parts to it, but they’ll usually be short and sweet like this unless I get carried away. 
> 
> I was thinking back to Act 6 Intermission 2 when [Terezi meets Aranea](http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006668) in the dream bubble, and I got the idea that maybe those who visit other people’s dreams can assume the role of someone in the memory, provided enough of the right criteria are met. And then I thought what if Alpha Dave sacrificed himself fighting against the Batterwitch so Dirk could make it into his session unharmed, and what if Beta Dave ended up getting inserted into a few of Dirk’s dream-memories, and this is the result.
> 
> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/41575183677/dreamcatcher-1) on Tumblr.

Waking up is like standing inside and watching the rain fall down in streams on a windowpane. You aren’t sure how you came up with that analogy, but it sticks in your head as the room swims into focus, your eyes already open before your brain catches up enough to process what you’re seeing. Whatever light source there is seems to be switched off, and the only window in the room is covered by what is either a thick black curtain or a repurposed blanket. You can barely make out the dark walls, covered in shitty but professionally framed posters and miscellaneous decor, shelves full of something that might be thin books or record sleeves, and enough shapeless furniture to clutter the remaining space and tie it all together in a loose theme that nags at the back of your head as familiar, but superficially, almost as though the familiarity itself is somehow fake. 

You take note of your position, reclining in a large bed with dark sheets that match everything else around you, and the last thing you remember is falling asleep in your own tiny bed on the meteor while trying your damnedest to ignore the sound of Karkat’s unmistakable shouting and the stray, intermittent honk from the vent in your room (it creeps the shit out of you that the troll clown is still wandering around, but even a healthy concern for your life isn’t enough to keep you awake indefinitely). The place you find yourself in now is strange, yet something in the back of your head is telling you that it’s familiar, that it’s okay, you can relax here, and you decide ‘what the hell’ and take the gut feeling at face value, letting yourself relax into the obscenely soft mattress while you listen to the distant sounds of a busy city, oddly muffled and somehow blurred, as if coming through several feet of water, and it’s the first thing that raises a red flag in your brain, followed immediately by a blaring siren of alarm when something pressed against your chest shifts without warning, startling you enough to make you tense.

"…Bro? What’s wrong?" comes the question, slow and sleep-muddled, characteristic of someone who’s been woken up unexpectedly. You don’t quite recognize the voice or understand the situation yet, and even though you’re still reeling from shock, that same spot in the back of your head prompts you with a handful of lines like a script. You follow them without thinking.

"Nothing, kiddo." And without meaning to, your hand moves almost of its own accord, lifting from your side and threading gentle fingers into the bed-headed mess of blonde hair pressed under your chin. "Go back to sleep."

"Mmkay." The reply is exhaled and slurred, the body molded against yours shifting, then relaxing again, and you’re left reeling, trying desperately to make sense of the situation, but before you can even begin to get a grasp on things, you’re fading, slipping away from the dark, muted room and jerking back into reality when a loud shout almost echoes off of your closed door, followed by the telltale angry stomp down the hall of your own personal favorite troll as he loses his shit at someone or something yet again, and you won’t admit to yourself that just this once, you’re almost grateful.


	2. Lessons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/42391841158/dreamcatcher-2) on Tumblr.

It doesn’t happen every night, but whenever it does, you wake up feeling almost twenty years older.

You’ve begun referring (in your own mind) to the strange nighttime episodes as “scripted dreams.” Most of them are mercifully brief and don’t involve a lot of interaction on your part- fleeting moments of standing in a dark room you’ve seen before, filled with tacky decor and stacks of paper covered in endless lines of writing, a living room that makes you feel sick with the similarity to the one from your childhood (same futon, television, even the view from the window is unchanged, but minus the disturbing pictures of puppets on the walls). There’s a door there that looks like it should lead to your old room, but it’s always closed, and whatever abridged script that’s responsible for feeding you lines and actions hasn’t told you to open it yet. You think you probably could, if you tried hard enough. You’re not being controlled so much as you’re being directed, but the way you’re always dropped into things mid-scene and sometimes mid-conversation, only to be yanked abruptly back out is extremely disorienting. There’s someone there with you, not always in the same room, but never far away. Sometimes you get a glimpse of blond hair and plain clothes, other times you’re speaking to someone nearby, asking them a question or responding to something they’ve said, but so far those moments have ended too quickly for you to get a grip on what’s happening around you.

Then one night you fall asleep and open your eyes to the blinding white porcelain of a bathroom. You’re standing, facing the tiled wall, and there’s a boy sitting in front of you, shoulders hunched and head bowed. Your first thought is that it’s you, a younger version of you, probably 12 or 13 from the size of his frame. Something drips to the floor from his face, and your knees bend until you’re kneeling down, at his level. The tiled floor is cold, but again the sensation is strangely muted, due to something other than the expensive-looking pair of black pants you’re wearing. You reach out a hand and curl your fingers under the boy’s chin, lifting his head until you’re pierced by the pair of sharp orange eyes that glower unhappily at you from behind a mess of disheveled hair, all smudged with dirt and grit. His face matches yours almost perfectly, and for a moment you feel like you’re looking in a mirror, except the eyes are all wrong, and the illusion is too imperfect to persist. His nose and upper lip are bleeding from a nasty-looking cut, like something you’d expect from a sword to the face, and you can see a dark bruise forming over his left eyebrow. Another drop of blood falls from the tip of his nose, and he sniffs wetly.

“You cracked my fucking tooth, Bro,” he mutters unhappily, tongue darting out to smear the blood across his lower lip, and your stomach does a weird little flip.

“Did I?” you ask rhetorically, and your other hand lifts to his face, gently pulling his split lip back with the edge of your thumb so you can observe the tiny chip in one of his incisors, and you’re suddenly confused by the size of your own hands, but he’s saying something again, and you have to remove your thumb so he can speak clearly.

“I don’t see what beating the shit out of me has to do with learning how to protect myself.” He punctuates the sentence with another loud sniffle against the blood running out of his nose. The corners of your mouth lift on their own into a smile, while inside you’re plagued by vivid flashbacks of saying almost the exact same thing to your own brother, except it feels like a lifetime ago, and you resolve then and there to talk to Rose about this when you wake up, because you can’t handle whatever this is on your own anymore. That spot in the back of your head feeds you some vague bullshit line about learning by doing and how it’s not about winning, but you grit your teeth against it, you’re not doing this, you won’t, not when you remember exactly what it felt like to sit in front of your Bro with blood running down your face while he lectured you on what you did wrong. Your fingers tighten on the boy’s chin, and he blinks at you, confused.

“No,” you mutter through your teeth. He seems to say something, asking you a question, but your mind is already clawing at the walls of this twisted fucked-up dream, and it doesn’t take long for you to force your way through it and out into the waking world.

There’s a moment then, before you’re dropped unceremoniously back into the reality of your disheveled bed, when the white-tiled room around you seems to blur slightly, like a camera lens moving just a bit out of focus, and the boy in front of you suddenly seems older, taller than before, less like a child and more like the doppelganger of a whole library of painful memories you violently recoil from thinking about. It only lasts a second, but it’s long enough to make you wake up shivering in a cold, panic-induced sweat.

After spending almost an hour lying on your back, staring at the slate grey metal of the ceiling and trying to recollect yourself, you eventually regain enough composure to get dressed and leave, then immediately make a beeline for Rose’s. You don’t come out of her room until you’ve unloaded on her every confused, distraught detail and recollection of your bizarre pseudo-recurring dreams while she sits quietly and lets you run yourself ragged pacing back and forth across the floor. By the time you finish, you’ve already resolved not to fall asleep again if you can help it, which she advises against, but her advice doesn’t stop you from keeping yourself awake for the next two days with an unhealthy amount of coffee, and when you finally do crash and succumb to the quiet relief of sleep, the only dream-world flashes you get are of an old paved rooftop and a familiar city skyline that makes you feel miserably homesick.


	3. Dissonance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/58716333632/dreamcatcher-3) on Tumblr.

TT: Roxy?  
TG: hey distri whats up  
TT: It happened again last night.  
TT: I can’t take any more of this.  
TG: aw dirk :(  
TG: do you want to talk about it?  
TG: ive been dreaming a lot about mom  
TT: It was different this time.  
TG: uhhh different how  
TT: Do you remember how I said that it felt like I was being watched?  
TT: And that everything seemed a bit off?  
TG: well yeah but i never understood what you meant by that stuff  
TG: i mean sure dreaming about your memories can be kind of weird and disorienting  
TG: and you wake up thinking youre 12 or some shit and you get that moment where everything feels normal and okay but then its not  
TG: like i get that part but not sure what youve been going on about  
TT: I guess it’s kind of hard to explain.  
TT: But after things got weird this time

 

 

I thought I saw someone.

 

 

One night, after a particularly rough week of trying to deal with Rose’s worsening alcoholism, Terezi’s self-destructive love life, and the overall increasing disfunction of your group, you find yourself standing in a familiar living room- the futon in front of the big-screen TV, flanked by stacks of video games, the rat’s nest of wires and cables that sprawl tangled across the floor, even the view from the tiny square window framing the city’s skyscrapers- it’s the backdrop of your childhood from what feels like an eternity ago.

There’s someone there, standing in front of the window, outlined in black by the sunlight. It almost looks like another you, turned away towards the glass, like you’ve tapped into your time powers and split yourself in two, but the illusion is broken when the figure turns their head just a little in your direction, and you catch sight of those pointed shades, and your stomach drops into the floor. It’s the kid from before, the one with the split lip. He’s older this time, and the slight change along with the sunglasses hits you hard like a punch to the face. It’s your Bro. It has to be. He’s too young, the hair is wrong, the arms and legs too thin, too bony and wiry, but it’s still him. It’s in his posture, the way he holds himself like an alpha dog challenged for dominance. You’d recognize the set of his shoulders anywhere. There’s no doubt in your mind that it’s him as a kid, and these dreams could have something to do with your time powers if you’re somehow seeing images of the past, but that doesn’t explain who you’re filling in for, or the apartment, or why it’s exactly the same as you remember from your own childhood, because you were under the impression that he didn’t even find the place until after he found you.

“Maybe I don’t give a shit.” He suddenly breaks the silence. Apparently you’ve been dropped halfway into a conversation again. “Maybe I don’t care.”

“This isn’t about you,” you reply, your own voice hard, and shit that got awkward fast.

“No, how could I have been so stupid,” he says sardonically. “You’re right. It’s never been about me. Thanks for the reminder, I’d almost forgotten.”

“Dirk.” Who? “Stop.”

“Why, don’t like hearing me say it out loud? It wouldn’t bother you so much if it weren’t true.”

You startle yourself with a short bark of laughter, humorless and sarcastic. Apparently whoever you’re playing isn’t intimidated in the least, even if the actual you is having distressing flashbacks to the few times you and Bro got into fights.“You’re not Lalonde, kid. Quit trying to act like her.” Now that’s a name you recognize, maybe it’s possible that he knew Rose’s family somehow, but the script is continuing without you.

“Quit dodging the subject,” he retorts, and you shake your head.

“I can count the number of people who have the resources to stand up to that company’s CEO on one hand, including myself, and still have fingers left over. She’ll ruin anyone else who tries. You know that.”

“Yeah, Bro, I fucking know that. And you know what else I know?” It’s not the first time he’s called you that, and there’s an undercurrent of fear in his voice, just below the anger. You know that fear. “Everyone who stands up to her dies.”

“We’re done talking about this.”

“Bro-”

“Dirk, enough,” you command sharply, and he seethes before turning and walking away, and you try to open your mouth, get his attention to figure out exactly who or when you are, but that damned prompter in your head holds you back like a leash wrapped around your throat, and just when you manage to get your mouth open, the door to your old room slams shut, and you’re left standing alone. You wait for the usual out-of-focus blur to set in, signaling that the dream’s over and you’re about to wake up, but the seconds go by and nothing happens. The muffled and strangely hazy sound of traffic continues to cut the silence, and after a full minute of standing and waiting, you realize that nothing’s telling you to hold still anymore.

It takes a little more effort than it should, but you manage to look down at your own feet, and find the floor to be much further away than you’re accustomed to. Your shoes are black and immaculately clean, just like the matching pair of pants and suit jacket, and you remember this outfit from the last time you got a glimpse of yourself in these dreams. That gives you an idea, and you walk towards the television screen, navigating the rug of cables and wires with the experience of thirteen years. When you approach the dark glass, there’s the vague image of a stranger looking back at you. Whoever you are, you’re bigger and older than kid Bro. It’s hard to make out details, but a cautious hand on your own face confirms the presence of rough stubble that sure as hell wasn’t there when you fell asleep, along with a pair of large aviator sunglasses that remind you of your own when your fingers trace around the frames. You wish there was a mirror nearby so you could see your face, maybe then you’d be able to place it with an old family photograph or something, match it to an uncle or grandfather or whatever. He never talked about family, and you never asked, but it’s possible that he showed you pictures once when you were a child and you forgot. It’s an optimistic thought, but you don’t have much else to go on right now.

Now that you’ve more or less regained control, you cautiously begin to explore. The sense of deja vu is still potent, but now you’re starting to notice subtle differences that you hadn’t picked up on before. This is the first time you’ve had a real chance to look around, and you’re not going to waste it.

Entering the kitchen next to the living room reveals a familiar table and set of countertops, with a refrigerator that could have been lifted directly out of your home, but that’s as far as the similarity goes. The counters are actually being used to hold appliances and kitchenware, for one thing, and not a single puppet or misplaced sharp object is in sight. There’s a stack of uninteresting papers on the table, next to a mug filled with assorted pencils and pens, and one of the chairs seems to be missing. The surface of the refrigerator is bare, except for a list of emergency numbers, a blank notepad, and a magnetic business card for chinese takeout with an address scratched onto the side in pen. The basic layout is the same, but the illusion that you’re revisiting your childhood has finally been broken, because it’s obvious that someone else is living here, someone who clearly doesn’t share your Bro’s unique affinity for puppets. Returning to the living room confirms your suspicions. Where your brother used to cover every available wall space with colorful posters, here are only basic, tasteful photographs and a few magazines hung up in frames. The cables on the floor are still a mess, but what you thought were stacks of video games are actually DVD’s- hundreds of them, some of which you recognize, but most with obscure titles and unfamiliar actors that you’ve never heard of.

As you approach the television again to get a closer look, something inexplicably pushes your attention towards the closed door of your old room. It’s the door your kid Bro slammed when he walked away, and now your feet turn and carry you closer to it until there’s only an arm’s length between you and the wooden surface. You’re suddenly being directed again, and the doorknob is cold and heavy in your hand, but before you can turn it, there’s a soft sound that catches your ear. You can hear him, and he’s crying.

Opening the door and walking into his room is the most disorienting experience you’ve had since the dream in the bathroom. Here you can see the same stylistic taste that decorated your old home with neon posters and felt toys, and it only reinforces your conclusion that the teenager in front of you is your Bro, sitting hunched over on the edge of the bed, face buried in his arm and pointed shades held loosely in his hand. You follow the script without a fight, walking across his room, stepping over stray puppets and rumpled clothes, until you’re next to him. He doesn’t look up when you sit down, and you lift a hand to rest it on top of his head, threading your fingers into his hair when he still doesn’t move. “Hey,” you whisper, moving your hand down to his back and gently rubbing in circles. “C’mon kiddo.”

He sniffs wetly and mumbles something that you don’t quite catch.

“Kid, I can’t understand you with that arm attached to your face,” you say, and his head lifts slowly, until he looks up at you with raw, bloodshot eyes. His face is a mess, smeared wet from where it was pressed against his arm, and you’re suddenly having difficulties rectifying this situation with what you know about him. Your Bro was hard, detached, unimpressed by life’s nuances, and never even came close to showing the type of emotion you’re witnessing. Granted, he was a lot older when you knew him, but you wouldn’t have thought he would change all that much just because of a missing decade or two.

When kid Bro tries to talk, he chokes and has to cough first before trying again.

“What am I supposed to do?” he croaks, voice thick with tears. “What do you expect me to do if you die?”

“Hey. When has anyone ever gotten the best of me? Seriously, if you can name a single time when I’ve been beaten at my own game, I’ll buy you a fucking pony. I mean it this time.” He glowers miserably at your attempt to lighten the mood, and you heave a sigh in defeat. “It won’t come to that, I promise.”

He’s silent for a long moment before looking up at you again, his expression defeated and sad.

“Don’t fight her. Please.”

“Look, regardless of what I said earlier, I can’t let you grow up in a world ruled by a single corporation.”

“I don’t give a shit about what happens to the world,” he says quietly. “I don’t want anything to happen to _you_.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me. I know what I’m doing, I’ve been playing this game my entire life, and I’m sure as hell not going to let my ass get handed to me by some decrepit old woman with a misplaced napoleon complex. Don’t worry about it, okay?” You wrap your arm around his slumped shoulders, and he slowly relaxes against you.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Okay, Bro.”

The two of you lapse into a comfortable silence, punctuated every now and then by a sniffle, and you rub at the side of his arm reassuringly, or apologetically, it’s hard to tell when you’re only watching yourself perform the actions from a script. You’re not sure that you fully understand the dynamics at play here. Since these dreams started you’ve been feeling like they’re something you’re not supposed to be seeing, like you’re intruding somewhere you don’t belong, especially when you’re participating in arguments you’ve never had in the body of someone you don’t recognize. It feels like a violation, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

“Wait … you lied.”

“I … what?”

“You lied to me.” Kid Bro pulls away from you slowly, staring at you with a deepening frown. “I believed you, and … ” His eyes widen, and he practically throws himself away from you, standing and glancing wildly around the room before his eyes settle hard on you. “What the fuck is this.”

“Uh … ” and just like that, the teleprompter in the back of your head that had been faithfully feeding you lines and actions from the very beginning is gone. You’re at a loss for words, suddenly handed back your free will without any warning and no indication of what to say next, and you’re floundering.

“This. What the fuck is this. You’re dead. I saw you on your back with … with … ” His expression slowly changes from anger to dread, and you follow his eyes down to your shirt, where a wet, red patch is blooming in the center of your chest, staining the white fabric. It’s warm, the way you know blood is when it soaks your clothes.

“What … what the fuck, what the _fuck_ … ” He backs away, a hint of panic in his voice. You lift a hand to your chest and press against the wound, but there’s no stab of pain, and you don’t feel like you’re rapidly losing the amount of blood you seem to be, but your hand still comes away red, and the smell of iron is too strong for it to be anything else. When you look up again at Bro, you can see the edges of the room starting to blur, but he’s still in focus, and when you glance back down at your shirt, it’s the same bright red as your god tier outfit.

In fact, it’s exactly the same as your god tier outfit.

When you carefully look back up at Bro, his expression is slowly shifting from fear into a murderous glare. You’re suddenly on the same level as him, and the abrupt change in height is disorienting. When he speaks, there’s poison laced in every word.

“You’re not him.”

“Uh … wait, hold on-”

“Who are you?! It’s been you this entire fucking time, every other goddamn night, what the hell do you want from me?!”

“Wait, I’m not doing it on purpose!”

He approaches you, the room blurring as the colors blend together around him, and when he reaches you he grabs your shirt and roughly pushes you down, digging his knee into your gut when you try to resist. One hand seizes a handful of your hair and forces you to look up at him. His face gets very close to yours, and his words come out in an angry hiss.

“Stay. The _fuck_.” He punctuates the curse with a shove. “Out of my head.”

“I’m sorry.” It’s the only thing you can think of to say, your own voice a whisper. He stares at you through your shades, his eyes cold and hard, but you know the color of them like your own name. It’s the comfort of apple juice in sippy cups and falling asleep to late-night TV shows with a strong arm wrapped around you. It’s stealing his hat and wearing it around the apartment for hours even though it always fell over your eyes, or swiping his shades and trying to balance them on your nose because they wouldn’t fit right on your face, and the awful ache in your chest that you’ve been ignoring and savagely pushing down since finding your Bro on his back in a pool of his own blood starts to rise up again, into your throat until it tightens and your eyes sting with the tears you’ve been fighting back for months.

The room fades out to white just as the first teardrops roll down the sides of your face, your kid brother’s hand still tangled painfully in your hair. His expression seems to change slightly, at the moment just before you’re pulled back by some unseen force into your bed, but whether it was the beginnings of confusion or disgust, you never get to find out. There are wet streaks already down the sides of your face when your eyes open to the plain gray walls of the meteor, and for the first time since Bro died, you finally let yourself cry.


	4. Meaning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/64908403651/dreamcatcher-4) on Tumblr.

It’s quiet when the dream breaks and reality comes drifting in through the hard floor against your back and the wall forcibly bending your head forward. Skaia’s light is casting jagged shadows on your face where your shades are tilted haphazardly to the side, pulled askew by the uncomfortable angle you fell asleep in, and the projection of your virtual desktop is set to a disorienting tilt on top of the unused walk-in pantry you seem to have found your way into last night. You reach up with one hand to right them after shaking your fingers to get rid of their tingling numbness, and the screen immediately lights up with bright lines of text that make you squint miserably.

 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Morning bro.   
TT: Did you sleep well?  
TT: That was a rhetorical question.  
TT: I’ve been keeping track of your heart rate, it was off the charts for a minute there from what I assume to be another of your dream memories.  
TT: Not that I’m interested in discussing it or anything.

 

“Good, because I’m not interested in discussing it either,” you say aloud, your own voice like gravel in your ears. The wall serves as an anchor to help you stand, and your muscles complain when you straighten up and lean against it. You picked a shitty position to sleep in, but it’s nothing a little exercise won’t fix.

 

TT: Come on, don’t be like that.  
TT: It’s fascinating to me that you’re able to relive a random memory every night and yet continue to deny that there might be a significant reason for it.

 

You will some of the life back into your stiff legs and walk into the kitchen, where you’re greeted with an empty room. Roxy’s parties usually run late, but last night was the third day in a row you’d been awake, and there was pretty much no way you weren’t going to pass out before midnight. “Maybe that’s because finding significance in it won’t change anything.” There’s an empty cup next to the sink. It smells fruity and stale when you hold it up, but you can’t find the motivation to care, turning on the tap and filling it with lukewarm water. “They’re just nightmares, no matter how real they seem.”

 

TT: That’s not the same tone I remember you taking with Roxy the other day.  
TT: From what it sounded like, you seem to be progressively encroaching on the edge of paranoia and psychosis.  
TT: Which is understandable, especially given the emotional pain from reliving what I’d say were happier times.  
TT: Either way, I’m not the one who’s fixated on an indistinct feeling of being watched.  
TT: That’s textbook schizophrenia, dude.

 

The tap shuts off with a clunk, and you quickly down half of the cup while making your way into the living room. It seems you’re not entirely alone. Jane is sitting on one of the couches, busying herself with an unidentifiable pink, box-shaped chunk of technology. She looks up when you enter.

“Oh, Dirk. I thought I heard you get up.” She doesn’t stop fiddling with the thing, and you join her after she absentmindedly moves over a few inches to make room. “We were debating putting a blanket over you, but Roxy assured us that you’d be fine.”

 

TT: I’m going to put forth a hypothesis, and you can agree or disagree with it based on the evidence I’ve observed so far.  
TT: While normally I’d write off your abnormal nocturnal habits as the inevitable symptoms of a strained psyche, the fact that your friends have been having similar experiences of their own means that this is not an isolated phenomenon.  
TT: Furthermore, the fact that this only started once you all entered the medium suggests that it has more to do with the game itself.

 

“Yeah, I’m used to sleeping on the floor.”

“That’s got to be hard on your back.” She frowns slightly, then shrugs, not taking her eyes off of the device. “But I suppose I shouldn’t really be talking when I fall asleep on top of my fork half the time. It’s hard to sleep without a weapon these days. I can’t believe I’m actually saying that out loud.” The pink device gives a high-pitched ping, and she reaches up to the side of her mustache headset. “Roxy, it made a noise. Is that good?”

The garbled sound of someone replying just barely reaches you, but you can’t make it out. You’re sure whatever they’re doing is important, but it’s hard to take interest when you’re feeling the beginnings of a splitting headache coming on. The cup in your hand might have been yours from last night. It’s hard to remember. You don’t usually let your friends talk you into drinking, but it’s been a rough few weeks, and Jane’s birthday was as good an occasion as any.

 

TT: Everything in Sburb has a reason, Dirk.  
TT: This is a game, and games have rules.  
TT: Maybe you’ll be able to solve a few riddles by figuring out what it all means.  
TT: Otherwise, there’s not much I can do to help you, bro.

 

“Got it. Should I wait until you’re in position?” Jane stands up and walks a few feet away from the couch towards the center of the room, then kneels and carefully places the box on the floor. She pauses and listens for a moment, then pushes a few buttons on top of it and stands back as the device starts to glow a light, hazy pink.

 

TT: I saw what you said to Roxy. You were desperate to make the dreams stop.  
TT: Is the memory of him really so much more painful when it’s tangible instead?

 

You reach up and yank your shades off as Jane’s device starts to hum loudly, then suddenly unfolds into a large fenestrated window. Jane gives a hoot of success, and a moment later the glow brightens as Roxy jumps out of it through the floor.

“Hell _yeah_! I am an engineering genius! Jane, you are totally the best assistant ever.” The two of them share an enthusiastic high-five, before Roxy turns and sees you sitting on the couch. “Strider! Geez, finally. Thought I’d maybe alcohol poisoned you or something, I swear you had a higher tolerance the last time I checked.”

Her smile is easy, and you mirror it as best you can, tucking the shades into your pocket. “I think my untimely passing out had more to do with sleep deprivation than anything else. Sorry about that, Jane. I didn’t mean to miss out on your party. How was the cake?”

They fill you in on what you missed, and eventually go off on a tangent about who’s winning their ongoing bet to cut the most symmetrical slice of cake while you tighten your fist around the pair of shades in your pocket, as though you could push AR’s red lines of text back into the glass if you wanted it hard enough. Roxy seems to notice that you’re on edge, and she ushers you into the kitchen while Jane promises to alchemize something palatable for a late lunch, reaching for her headset to call Jake back from wherever he’s wandered off to. She sits you down at the table and gives you a concerned look while Jane laughs into her headset, and you feel like punching a hole through the wall.

You don’t know who he was, but you know he’s been there before. Flashes of red, rare moments of clarity, the feeling of someone looking over your shoulder. It comes and goes, but you’ve always trusted your eyes, and you know what you saw. Whether there’s significance to it or not, you need to find a reason. You can’t go on like this. It might have all been paranoia or hallucinations before, but you had your hands on him this time. You could feel the heat of his skin through his clothes, he was _real_. 

When Roxy leaves momentarily to let Jake in through the front door, you set the cup aside and reach into your pocket for your shades, slipping them back onto your face and scrolling quickly past the backlog of indignant red text before mentally typing out a reply.

 

TT: They aren’t memories. Not real ones, anyway.  
TT: They go wrong sometimes.  
TT: When I remembered how Bro died, he started bleeding in the exact same spot.  
TT: I’m pretty damn sure that didn’t happen back when we had the fight I was dreaming about.  
TT: Sounds like you might have crossed some wires, mnesiologically speaking.  
TT: Then I saw some kid in a red outfit.   
TT: I’ve seen him before. He’s been impersonating my Bro.  
TT: And how exactly has he been doing that?  
TT: How did you manage to mistake “some kid” for your very much adult brother?  
TT: Should I be concerned about your declining cognitive abilities, Dirk?  
TT: Because when Bro vanished, he was there, and when I accused him of it, he said he wasn’t doing it on purpose.  
TT: He had the same fucking shades on and everything.  
TT: I don’t know who he is, but if I ever get my hands on him again, I’m going to put a stop to this for good.  
TT: I hate to say it bro.  
TT: But I’m starting to see why your friends are so worried about you.

 

Jake claps a hand on your shoulder (good to see you’re out of the ditch old chap!) and you shrug it off with a halfhearted glare (not quite yet then, righto). Jane happily greets him with a one-armed hug around the spoon in her hand, and Roxy pulls out the chair next to you, sitting down with an apologetic smile. You turn off the built-in computer with a tap to the edge of your shades, and she reaches out, gently rubbing the side of your arm.

“Is everything okay, Dirk?”

Lying to her is easy. It’s convincing her that’s hard, and she knows you well enough that it may as well be a rhetorical question, but it also means that you don’t have to be honest.

“Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AU where Jake and Jane got together and everyone's happy except for Dirk.


	5. Ultimatum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/68207158679/dreamcatcher-5) on Tumblr.

It’s gotten to the point where you don’t fight it anymore.

At first it confused you, opening your eyes to a room filled with familiar, comforting objects from your childhood- robot parts, swaths of felt fabric, bundles of wire and spare computer parts, colorful knickknacks and expensive hardware, your favorite art on the walls and your old tools between your fingers, rough in all the right places where you were careless with them. That wonderful feeling of having nowhere to go and the entire day at your disposal. It fooled you into thinking you were still on Earth, that Sburb was an upcoming game title, and that everything was back to the way it should be. It was like watching a movie you’ve seen hundreds of times, with your own words and actions coming through as easy, thoughtless reflexes.

And in a mixed blessing like sugar-coated arsenic, you got to see him again.

He was around far less often than he was out working the set, rarely staying home for more than a day at a time during Hollywood’s busy season, but for whatever reason, the dreams seem to increasingly cherry-pick those particular memories for you to relive. The sight of him up and walking around again like nothing happened is cruel in its accuracy- same suit and tie, same black slacks, same combed hair and aviator shades- but you know it’s not him because he’s been dead for months.

Due to whatever system of rules these dreams are operating on, once you managed to remember that fact, it became much easier for your mind to reject the fabricated reality of these memories. The dreams were confusing before, and now they’re almost unbearable, as you’re forced to act out these repetitive scenes with him, all while knowing that he’s gone and you’ll never really see him again. The only upside is that you’re gradually losing the ability to care, while something resigned and hopeless slowly takes it’s place.

Maybe your friends are right to worry about you.

The wheel spins in your hand, making a dry sound against the ungreased spoke held between your fingers. It’s a spare part to one of your skateboards, one of four when you removed them to refit it with rocket boosters. The board was old when you found it out back in the alley before adopting and repurposing it with a new flame motif paint job, but you never got around to testing it out with different fuel mixtures, and it sat unused in your room until the day the session started. You can feel the smooth edge of it now with your feet, propped up against the wall underneath the workbench where you’re slouching forward in one of your Bro’s old office chairs. The chipped wood surface of the table digs pleasantly into your elbows, bringing back other memories of countless projects taken well into the early morning hours that filled your room with the smell of burning metal and fabric dye. The spinning wheel in your hand slows until it stops, the company’s name in faded black ink becoming legible again once it’s not a blurred line of letters. You reach up to spin it again out of boredom, touching your fingers to the fine layer of grit ground into the plastic. There’s a hand on your door frame and an expensive watch on the wrist.

“Hey kid. Got a minute?”

“Does it look like I’m busy?” you reply, setting the wheel spinning again. You hear him move into your room, his polished black shoes against the carpet. He walks behind you and pretends to take interest in one of your posters, stalling. You don’t like it when he stalls. It means he’s about to say something you won’t like, and he knows you well enough to predict that accurately. It sets you on edge. “What do you want, Bro?”

“Well shit, I didn’t realize I wasn’t allowed to hang out in here anymore. When did that change?”

“You just asked if I had a minute.”

“Looks to me like you’ve got several.” He reaches up and pushes his shades up to rest on top of his head, fixing you with his red eyes, and now you’re really on edge because if whatever he’s got to say warrants such a disarming gesture, then he’s definitely expecting you to take it badly.

But he surprises you, approaching from behind and putting a hand on the back of your chair. You reflexively jerk forward and drop the wheel, grabbing the arms on either side when he starts to push down and tip you backwards.

“I’ve been wondering what you were doing in here that was so important that I haven’t seen you since yesterday. And after all that fuss you made because I wasn’t supposed to be home until next weekend,” he says, continuing to push your chair until the top of your head brushes against the buttons on the front of his suit and you’re forced to look at him upside down.

“You were jetlagged, I was letting you sleep- knock it off, Bro, what the hell!?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t withered and died in here like a desiccated plant yet. Do you have any idea what most kids your age are doing?” He pauses for narrative effect, and you resign yourself to wallow up at him unhappily while he monologues. “They’re having unprotected sex and doing all kinds of illicit, mind-melting drugs. Not to mention the teen pregnancy rate is way up. I mean, I’m not really surprised, what with all the rampant STDs I guess folks have got to get around, but it almost puts some of those Hollywood socialites to shame, and if there’s anyone who knows anything about the condition of famous celebrity genitals, it’s me. I could probably make twice my yearly salary just doing checkups for some of the folks I rub elbows with. It’s gotten so bad you have to practically wear condoms on your arms everywhere you go. Do you know how contagious some of that shit is? And today’s rubbers are all kinds of expensive, not to mention you have to choose between the lubricated ones and the ones with those little ribs on the inside or whatever. If you can’t afford to use protection, it’s better to just stay home, little dude.” You stare at him patiently, meeting his uncovered eyes with yours through the dark glass of your shades. He lifts a hand and gently taps the center of your forehead with his finger. “I didn’t come home early so you could sit in your room and reenact the premise of Solaris.”

“I was letting you sleep.”

“You would have stayed in here all day if I hadn’t let myself in.”

“Yeah well I kind of figured you would once you woke up.”

“Really, Dirk. Since when do you _expect_ me to let myself into your room?”

“Since you started doing it whether I want you to or not.”

“You come into my room all the time, little man.”

He does has a point there, even though you’re technically still a teenager and have every right to be irrationally territorial about your own bedroom. You open your mouth to say as much, but the sudden and unexpected brush of fingertips against the front of your neck has him smirking at your reaction as the words die in your throat. Your pointed shades are the next casualty, taken from you when he removes and places them off to the side on your workbench. The thumb he fondly smooths across the bridge of your nose and along one eyebrow speaks his intentions plainly, and you should have known he was getting you all riled up just to throw you off. It’s typical of him, a favorite tactic to get underneath your skin and past your defenses when he thinks you’re being difficult. You should probably mind the fact that he does it so brazenly, except you know what’s coming next. He leans down, and your eyes almost shut in anticipation as he closes the distance between you.

But then you catch a hint of the slightest hesitation. It’s brief, and you would have missed the barely perceptible jerk in his movements if you hadn’t been staring at him, like he tried to pull away from you for a moment. It sets something inside of you ajar, a dissonant key struck on a piano that has you tensing up again, trying to remember if this is how it happened the first time, if he paused before kissing you ( _is it really him or is someone is wearing his skin again_?) but the interruption is gone too quickly for you to act on it. His chin, peppered with rough stubble that matches the color of your hair, brushes against your nose, and you lose your death grip on paranoia when his warm mouth slides gently over your lower lip. It only takes a handful of seconds before you give in and kiss him back the way you remember, parting your lips for him and feeling his tongue caress the inside of your mouth as a reward.

But still there’s that dissonant note in the back of your head, and you stubbornly try to ignore it. Were his fingers against your throat so hesitant last time? Did his jaw have the same stiffness to it? You thought he’d kissed you harder before, and the contact ends sooner than you remember when he lets go of the chair and pulls away to blink at you, his expression almost shocked.

That settles it, then.

You turn around in the chair and stare at him. The silence in the room is wrong, you’re missing the dialogue that you know was supposed to come next, like it’s scrolling down on a prompter and you’re actors on a movie set. It’s an uncomfortable feeling in a vague, psychological sense. You speak the lines just to relieve some of the invisible pressure, but inside you’re coiled tight, and you can tell from his face that he knows you know.

“What did you want to tell me, Bro?”

“I ... I have to leave tomorrow.”

“What? You just got here.” The words are familiar, but you purposefully speak them in a flat monotone, completely devoid of the hurt and disappointment they originally carried. He blinks at you again, and takes a small step back when you stand from the chair.

“I know, I’m sorry kid,” he says, with a tremor to his voice that shouldn’t be there. You turn and casually remove the katana from its wall-mounted holder above the workbench, fitting it easily into your hand while he talks in stilted sentences. “They had to ... move the shooting location at the last minute and, and it fucked everyone’s schedules up.” You advance towards him nonchalantly with the blade held loosely at your side as he backs away from you, until his legs hit the edge of your bed and he almost stumbles. “We already had to replace two of the actors.”

“When will you be back?”

“A few ... a f-few weeks, probably.”

“Hm.” You lift the sword and point it squarely at his face before breaking the script. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put this sword through your skull.”

His hands raise in defense, a white-flag gesture that makes your fist clench harder around the hilt, because your Bro never acted like a coward, and this imposter is insulting his memory by making him dance like a spineless puppet. You see him swallow visibly and part his lips (god you _knew_ it wasn’t him and you kissed him anyway, _why_?).

“I’m your brother,” he whispers. “Please.”

He makes no move to get away while you stare at him, gauging how much you really want to put your sword through his eye (the answer is very much so). His outline wavers as the rest of the room starts to blur, like you’re looking at him through a layer of water, and you have to angle the sword down slightly after the colors resolve and he sheds the disguise, turning back into the scrawny teenager from before, aviator shades still pushed up on his head. Everything else has gone fuzzy and white again, the way it always does before you wake up, but you’re not leaving this time, not until you’ve made sure this imposter isn’t breathing anymore. When you’re silent for too long, the kid finally makes a move, but you stare at him incredulously when it’s only to buckle his knees in front of you.

“Please?” He kneels with his arms at his sides in a blatant surrender and looks up at you with the most pitiful expression you’ve ever seen. The tip of your sword wavers where it’s pointed at his face. You want to end this, to get this parasite out of your memories and go back to suffering through them alone, and you’re one single move away from getting rid of him, but the steel blade is suddenly heavy in your hand.

It’s his eyes. Now that you can see him without the stolen shades covering his face, he looks exactly like your Bro.

“You look like him,” you mumble, carefully lifting a few strands of his blond hair with the tip of the blade, and you’re secretly impressed when he doesn’t try to lean away from it. “You look exactly like him, but I don’t know who the fuck you are.”

“Dave … Dave Strider.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, that’s my name.”

“Your name is _Dave_ Strider?” You press the tip of the blade into his clavicle and watch his jaw tighten. “Sorry, kid, but no. You were close, though.”

“I’m not lying, I’m your brother!”

“My ‘brother’ was a thirty-four year old film director, and you are a teenager in red pajamas, how stupid do you think I am?”

“But you’re him, aren’t you? You have to be. It’s the same apartment and everything, and you look like him.” He looks around for a moment, seeming to suddenly realize something. “What year is it here?”

“No. You’re seriously going to try and pull that time-traveling bullshit trope?” You lift your foot and bring it down hard against his shoulder, forcing him onto the ground on his back. “You come in here, assuming you’re even real and not a figment of my sadistic imagination, intruding on my memories, wearing my brother’s skin around like it’s a fur coat, and now you expect me to play twenty questions? I’ve never seen you before in my life, _Dave_. I don’t give a shit who you are, and I’m done with you and these stupid fucking dreams!”

“Wait, I don’t know why it happens! I’m not doing it on purpose, and I can’t make it stop, I don’t know how!”

“Oh yeah? I’ve got an idea of how to stop this.”

You stand over the kid lying on the floor, pointing the tip of your sword directly at his heart and digging it into his skin through his red shirt with a twist of the hilt. He makes a panicked sound and reaches up to wrap his hand loosely around the blade. “Bro ... Dirk, wait.”

“I warned you.”

“Please don’t ...”

Time is running out for you to finish this, while the world around you continues to blur until there’s nothing left but you and the boy lying under your blade. It would barely take anything at all, just a shift of your weight into one arm. Maybe he’d be gone permanently, maybe not, but you have a feeling that killing him would carry a finality to it somehow, a strange intuition that you’ve had ever since the game started of something uncommonly lethal running through you that wasn’t there before, with a vivid color you can’t quite place. But you can picture this clearly- leaning into the hilt as the blade slides smoothly between his ribs, watching his body jerk and spasm as it passes into his heart, the spreading wet patch on his shirt, holding him skewered as his makes his last dying sounds on the floor, just like pinning an insect on display, just like …

Just like your Bro.

That day the session started. The blood pooling around him on the ground and his own sword, the same one he used to teach you and spar with you on the rooftop, broken off at the hilt and sticking up out of his chest. No image has ever been as persistently clear in your mind as his lifeless body on the pavement, appearing in front of you for days after, every time you closed your eyes. The hands that once held you close, with fingers that carded lovingly through your hair, now cold and dead, the color drained from them with the rest of his blood out onto the concrete. And that horrid alien witch, with her gold bangles and piranha's grin. She’d have killed you too, if he hadn’t distracted her long enough to slow her down, but in the end even your brother and Roxy’s mom together couldn’t inflict a single scratch on her. She taunted you, dared you to take revenge, you could tell from her smile that she wanted your throat between her teeth, but you remembered his final words in that moment: get into the session, no matter what happens. And you did. You obeyed him one last time, turned your back on your brother/father/lover, and left him there to be burned to ash by the meteors with the rest of the Earth, while Crockercorp’s Empress laughed over his corpse.

The sword shakes in your hand, and the air around you suddenly feels too thin to fill your lungs properly. Dave is trying to say something to you, a question or a plea, but the dream is already dissolving. You’re both submerged in that white fog and pulled somewhere else, away from here, away from him, and these godforsaken memories forming your own personal hell. You go with it willingly, anxious to escape, and Hal sends you a waterfall of text in response to the sounds you make when you wake in your disheveled bed. The shades clatter against the floor when you pull them off and throw them across the room in the darkness, pressing your hands against your face to muffle what you can’t hold back, but it’s not enough. The door to your room opens, and there’s a pair of arms wrapped around you, holding you against a warm body, and Roxy’s whispered voice in your hair telling you that it’s okay, I’m here, it’s gonna be okay Dirk, it wasn’t real, it was just a dream. You cling to her like she can help you, like there’s anything anyone can do to help you now, when the truth is that you may as well have died with your brother for all the good his sacrifice did.


	6. Disclosure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/70102733334/dreamcatcher-6) on Tumblr.

“He tried to kill me, Rose.”

She looks up, eyebrows raised in moderate surprise as the sewing needle in her hand stops, buried halfway into the beginnings of a deep blue dress draped over her legs. It’s the first time her fingers have paused since you came into her room, and she shares a quiet look with Kanaya, sitting next to her with a matching pile of fabric in her lap (which is still in the process of receiving an intricate black embroidery under the troll’s thin fingers). Her brief surprise fades into mild skepticism, before she pointedly resumes working down her line of stitches.

“And I assume he made those intentions plain to you?”

“Yeah, I think digging his sword into my shirt is pretty damn plain as far as intentions go.”

“Dave,” The needle loops under the cloth, pulling the two cut edges together. “I hate to sound dismissive of what was understandably a very frightening and upsetting experience for you, but you’ve said yourself that these episodes are just dreams.”

“But I’m telling you, it _hurt_. I could feel it breaking my skin. I know what a blade does when it’s shoved into my chest. Oh and hey, look at what I found when I woke up this morning.” Her skepticism quickly turns into actual shock, mirrored by Kanaya, when you pull the neck of your shirt aside to reveal the small laceration wound on your chest, now crusted over with blood. Your next words come slowly. “I know what a blade does when it’s shoved into my chest, Rose.”

“But that’s … impossible.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, you’re right, I must have gotten out of bed and picked up my sword and stabbed myself with it while I was asleep, then cleaned it off and put it back and laid down and tucked myself in before waking up, that must be what happened. Whew, I was worried for a second, that’s such a relief.”

“That’s not what I meant, Dave, please.”

“This?” you gesture to the wound. “This is real. This happened to me last night. I didn’t go to sleep like this, and there was _actual blood_ on my sheets this morning. From me. From this stab wound. That I got last night while I was asleep.”

“But you said it was dream, how could that happen? It doesn’t make sense.”

“They’re not just dreams, Rose, it’s like …” It’s like a feeling you can’t quite describe, and the words are stuck in the back of your throat, caught in the thick fog clouding your head ever since you stopped sleeping regularly. “It’s like I’m actually there, but at the same time, the place itself isn’t real, you know?” She meets you with a blank look, and you sigh, frustrated. “It’s like I’m watching a movie, or in the movie, and everything’s supposed to be a certain way because it’s written in stone or something, and whenever I try to do something different … everything kind of … fuck, I don’t know. It’s … okay, when you were a kid did you ever have one of those toys that you’d have to spin just right, and then once you got them going, they’d take forever to stop? And while it was spinning the way it’s supposed to, the thing would barely move at all and you couldn’t even tell it was actually spinning because it was just so perfectly symmetrical? But then after a while it would start tipping a little bit and wobbling, before the whole thing suddenly falls over? That’s what it feels like. It’s like there’s something running the way it’s supposed to, like a machine or a video or some kind of time loop, but then it starts going wrong if you fuck it up, and the whole damn thing falls apart and my kid brother tries to stab me with a katana because he’s pissed off that I’ve been watching him in the body of some guy he knew, oh and also I made out with him, did I mention that? Stuck my fucking tongue into his mouth and everything, god …”

There’s a long, silent pause, during which you cradle your head in your hands, refusing to continue this one-sided conversation, and you can imagine them giving each other meaningful looks while you slouch miserably. You hear one of them shift a little before speaking. “Dave, if I may.” It’s Kanaya’s soft voice. “It sounds to me like this younger version of your guardian might be experiencing something similar to what you are going through. If he is becoming defensive and violent towards your presence in these scenarios, perhaps he is also confused the way you are, and from what you have described, he seems to be just as aware as you are that you should not be there. I think that he is somehow experiencing these episodes with you, from whatever point in time he might be coming from. Perhaps it has something to do with your time powers?”

“I already thought of that,” you say, muffled behind your hands. “But it doesn’t line up. Bro didn’t get the apartment until after he found me, he told me himself.”

“Maybe he was less than truthful with you?”

“I dunno. Maybe. Either way, I don’t know what he’s going to do to me next time, and I don’t want to find out.” You stand to leave, tugging your shirt and cape roughly back into place. “I am never sleeping again, swear to fucking god.”

“Dave-”

“I know, Rose, but seriously, I’m not exactly keen on getting stabbed for real in a dream again, and I’m still not sure how that even works but whatever, it doesn’t matter. We’ve passed the point of this shit making sense anymore, this is the event horizon of crazy, fucked up nightmares.”

“Dave-“

“If getting run through in there does what I think it’s going to, then I’m staying awake from now until we reach the new session, consequences be damned. I’m living life on the edge here, twenty-four karat teenage insomnia, imported straight from China for all your-”

“ _Dave_.” The insistence in the word finally shuts you up. “I agree with you. Having another experience like that would undoubtedly be very bad, but you can’t stay awake forever. We still have another month left before we arrive. There’s got to be a better solution.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” you mutter bitterly. “The longer I can put off getting killed by my Bro, the better.”


	7. Phantom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/70208393111/dreamcatcher-7) on Tumblr.

Your promise to stay awake indefinitely manages to last until the third day.

Technically it’s a matter of roughly seventy hours since you last slept, since there’s no real sunlight in the void, and nothing to help you keep track of time except for the clocks around the meteor and your own time powers. You’ve always had an uncanny ability to pinpoint what time it was, sometimes to the very minute on days when you were especially on your game, but the last few weeks have been a hellish ordeal, to say the least. The third “night” of your flagging determination has you slouching towards your room after you almost passed out at your group’s large communal desk/table. Rose hadn’t stopped persuading you to get some shuteye since the last dream you suffered through, claiming that the injury might have been a fluke somehow, and that you don’t have much of a choice anyway when it comes down to it. You finally conceded tonight, much to her relief, but not for the reason she thinks you did. If you’re going to die from a sword to the chest, you might as well do it away from your friends to spare them from having to see it. A week ago you would have gone to your bed like it was the front line on death row, but chronic exhaustion has dulled your emotional responses to everything, including the possible loss of your own life, so you surrender, boneless and resigned, into the soft sheets as your thoughts fade and slow to a halt.

Still, it’s with no small amount of apprehension that you open your eyes after falling asleep, before taking in your surroundings with sudden confusion. You were expecting white walls and furniture, not asphalt and the flaked metal pole of a street sign less than a foot from your face. Repetition has made you familiar with the strange dreams in your apartment with kid bro, but this is something different entirely. The atmosphere is all wrong. A vast expanse of empty streets stretches out from you in every direction, lined with bizarrely tall buildings that vanish upwards into a grey fog where the sky should be, and you can’t hear the false sounds and muffled traffic of the city like before, but there is something else in its place- a rhythmic, concussive sound, akin to the ticking of some massive, unseen clock that vibrates through your body like a subwoofer turned up far too loud, to the point where it should be shaking the ground beneath your feet or breaking the pavement apart, but everything around you is unnaturally still, and you don’t know why, but it terrifies you. You can’t think straight with it quietly hammering away at the inside of your head, and you turn around to try and find your way back, even though you have no idea where you are or how to get out, and that’s when you see him.

He’s tall and broad, but wiry, leaning back against the brick wall of the building behind you, arms crossed and eyes covered with dark glass that you belatedly recognize as aviator sunglasses. You can’t see his eyes, but you can feel them on you, staring into you hard. The street sign rattles when you accidentally back into it, halting your attempt to get away and cutting into the paradoxical silence like a shattered glass. The sound seems to elicit the slightest movement from him, a shift of his head, the blond hair a stark contrast to his dark suit and what you thought was a red shirt as he unfolds his arms, but it isn’t, it’s blood soaking his clothes and a ragged, lethal wound torn into the fabric at the center, and you want to scream, but the air in your lungs is weak and thready, and all you manage is a harsh exhale as he straightens up.

The dream mercifully starts to fade as the sound of a voice reaches your ears, deep and unfamiliar. You don’t remember the words at first, waking up in your quiet room with the sheets twisted into knots around your legs and your head ringing painfully from the echo of that sound. You stumble into the adjacent bathroom and frantically splash cold water onto your face just to give your hands something to do, and spend the rest of the night crouched on the floor next to your bed, pressing your fingers into the sides of your temples to ease the ache in your skull and willing away the details of whatever that was from your mind. You’d gladly take your homicidal kid Bro and his sword over whoever and whatever the hell that was.

It’s not until your headache fades that the words come back to you, and it’s not until later the next morning, staring down absently into a lukewarm bowl of alchemized food, that you gradually recall the vague outline of a face in the black glass of a television screen, and recognize who it might have been that you shared a dream with last night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_I’m looking for my kid._

 

 

 

 


	8. Graveyard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/70520470357/dreamcatcher-8) on Tumblr.

The city’s in your lungs, clotted black with coagulation and smog. 

Your flesh is a part of the brickwork, a calcified fault in the cracks of the sidewalk. 

The skyscrapers grow from your skin like daisies, rooted into your bones with their plumbing, the subway system running tracks through your marrow. It’s your psyche on a paper plate, there’s nothing your mind touches that doesn’t erupt with winding streets and plexiglass windows, threaded with back alley varicose veins and chain link cartilage holding it together. It’s a twisted imitation of the world you unwillingly left for frontiers unknown, and you wound up right back where you began.

Dying felt more or less exactly the way you thought it would, which is to say pretty much like nothing at all apart from having a foreign object run through your rib cage, and by foreign object, you mean your own sword, and by rib cage, you mean everything from buttons to back seam, and it was a predictable god damn bloody mess. You’d have preferred the trident in retrospect- three holes to bleed you out faster instead of one, give your dying body less time to soak the pavement (stains clothes _and_ sidewalks). Your walking corpse seems to have no end to the stuff, you’re the nuclear fusion of hematopoiesis, cook this shit up and solve world hunger, a Nobel Prize would have made a great paperweight, pity you didn’t have the time.

There’s only one thing on your mind now, Earth’s fate and your own death be damned. His absence is a permanent discoloration on your grey matter, burnt into your cortex like a hot brand, insert key and turn. You’d gone past the point of panic, the all-consuming concept of _have to find him, he’s in danger_ , until you ran into Lalonde with her red orion’s belt, and she reminded you that you’re dead, you blew it, game over, thanks for playing. This false city is your afterlife, your bronze medal on a polyester ribbon. You told her you thought death would be, y'know, _deathier_ , and she said it’s because you’ve formed a bubble in the void, and you called her delusional, then apologized and corrected that to “confusing the shit out of me because I don’t have television psychic intuition powers like the other 99% of the population, can’t you just talk like a common pedestrian for once in your life (ha, right), cut me some slack here Londy” and she said the descriptor was already in layman’s terms and you told her fine whatever, come back when you decide to start making sense, you know where to find me, I’ll keep it warm for you darlin’. She thanked you and left, back to her version of New York or wherever she goes when she’s making house(bubble?)calls to the other residents of the afterlife, and there’s a solid metric shit ton of folks populating it- mostly trolls (way too many trolls), a handful of old geezers (one of whom’s a famous comedian guy you used to really dig as a kid, that was a nice surprise), and a lady who could be Lalonde’s twin but with a voice like a champagne glass trying to kick a habit. You’ve kept your distance from them all, after the obligatory “have you seen Dirk” questions, because there’ll be time for intros later when you’ve found him. 

Lalonde says it’s only ghosts and dreamers out here, and that the probability of actually finding him is “regrettably minute,” (that you shouldn’t be isolating yourself like this, that it isn’t healthy), so you reassured her that you’re just playing the odds, and shit, doesn’t she know grade school math stuff about probability? No matter how small the chances, everything happens at least once when you’ve got infinity to keep on trying. You’re a wind-up toy without legs, motor spinning endlessly in circles with nowhere to go, because even though he might not be here, all you can do is search until the universe winds down, but that won’t happen, because you’re the crowned apex of this temporal, centrifugal metronome. The world circles you like the hands on a clock, one second at a time, back and forth, in and out, up and down, one and two, and so forth, et cetera. It’s the intrinsic ebb and flow of reality, in layman’s terms. Lalonde ain’t the only one who can complicate a simple concept, tie that fucker in knots until it stops making sense anymore, you’re good at that.

One second you’re alone, and the next there’s a figure in red on the other side of the road. When he turns around, you see yourself from twenty years ago, and when he leaves, you wish he hadn’t so you could have gotten an answer from him, even if he didn’t stick around long enough to hear the other half of the question ( _have you seen him?_ ). It’s not unusual when folks flit in and out of existence like capricious fireflies with a dirty secret, but you’re more used to gray skin and Halloween horns than aviators and sun-kissed freckles that mirror your kid’s, stirring a lazy swarm of bittersweet, tactile memories, but it wasn’t him after all, and the search continues.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” you breathe aloud, a whisper in a silent city that beats to the sound of your soul in the void.


	9. Statutory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/83422393944/dreamcatcher-9) on Tumblr.

Something started to pull apart inside of your skull when you saw the man in the bloodied shirt. At first it was a only a feeling, the sensation of it stretching thread-like and thin at the center, one last tug away from snapping in two, but then came the echo of that thundering, silent metronome, rhythmic like the the rapid ebb and flow of your panicked breathing every time you catch yourself nodding off. The sound won’t stop once it starts ticking away in your mind, flicking at your brain like there’s some vital, unforgiving clue you’ve overlooked, and for the first time since this all started, you think you might actually go insane. Time passes on the meteor, and with it goes your memory of what a peaceful sleep used to be. You’ve already settled into the routine of staying awake until you can’t, but when exhaustion finally catches up to you and the next dream comes, it’s a harbinger of disaster.

You’ve grown accustomed to the visions of your false apartment, a deeper voice in your own throat, and the Texas sunlight through plastic window blinds, but this time when your mind slips, it’s into the subdued darkness of a familiar bedroom. You recognize it immediately from your very first scripted dream, with its black curtains against the city’s lights and the clutter on the shelves and desks, things that accumulate like dust when you’ve lived somewhere long enough. This time it’s not the surroundings that trip the alarm wire in the back of your head, but the alien warmth of another body beneath yours that has you reflexively attempting to pull away from the legs wrapped around your naked waist, the fingers digging into your shoulders, and a voice in your ear, breathless and colored with tones you’ve only ever heard through a computer’s speakers on websites you were too young to see. 

The sensation hits you like a hard splash of ice water, arousal so intense it borders on painful, and just like that you’re lost to it as you push into him over and over again. You didn’t want to believe it was him, recoiling from the mere thought of it, but the sound of his voice was unmistakable- failing to bite back the sounds that you were in the very act of forcing out of him, gasoline on a roaring fire, white-hot under your skin where you met him with your hands and hips, and then with your mouth, until he arched beneath you and cried out a name you didn’t quite recognize.

The taste of him lingers on your tongue like smoke. It was a short dream, not more than a minute in length before you wrenched yourself awake with a scream that brought Rose running to your room. Her attempts to physically comfort you only made your borderline hysteria worse, until she turned on the light and dragged you out of your room, away from your toxic viper of a bed and down the hall into the communal living room, where she forced a mug of scalding hot tea on you and made you sit with her until the cup stopped shaking in your hands, while you subconsciously rocked back and forth to the rhythmic ticking of that ever-present clock in your head. You couldn’t tell her what happened, even though she reasoned and pleaded with you, saying that if you talk about it then maybe you’ll feel better and maybe she can help you somehow, because she can’t watch this happen to you anymore, but you couldn’t do it. Even thinking hypothetically about broaching the topic was enough to twist your stomach into knots, and after an hour of enduring her questions and demands (because you care about her, and you’ll protect her from this even if it kills you), she reluctantly let it go.

You’ve been playing the dialogue over in your head since then, things you would have said if there was any chance of it making a difference. ‘Rose, I had sex with my brother. Not literally or physically or whatever, but we kind of fucked while I was in the body of that guy from before and I’m about ninety-eight percent sure they’re related and I don’t know what to do anymore.’ That last part you’ve been repeating to yourself frequently, as though admitting it will help you somehow, but you’re out of ideas with nowhere to go, and you’re starting to think that maybe your kid Bro was right. Maybe there really is no way to stop this, so long as you’re alive and whatever inexplicable cosmic machination that’s responsible for this trainwreck of a mindfuck continues to insert you into his memories. There’s nothing you can do but wait, until he puts his sword through your chest or cuts off your head, or whatever Bro’s got in store for you the next time you fall asleep.

It might be inevitable, but that won’t stop you from trying to delay it, and the one good thing about alchemized coffee besides the taste and weird texture, is that it never runs out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is finally starting to live up to its M rating. \o/


	10. Convergence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can also be found [here](http://mortior.tumblr.com/post/88699031376/dreamcatcher-10) on Tumblr.

Four days later, and you’ve spent all of them forcing yourself awake with enough caffeine to kill an ordinary human being. You know this, because you’ve already had two seizures, one of which ended with a sharp pain in your chest, followed by the blinding light of a god tier resurrection, and you’ve never been more grateful for Rose’s rampant alcoholism, because she’s only around the main room these days while she’s nursing a hangover. She cries sometimes when she talks to you. Karkat shuts himself away for days at a time, Gamzee hasn’t been seen in ages, Kanaya won’t leave Rose’s side, Terezi avoids you, and everything just seems to be falling apart in general. You wish you could help them, but you can’t even help yourself. There was a time when you had an entire mental folder of altruistic justifications for why you’re delaying the inevitable at the expense of your friends and your health, but it’s been swallowed by exhaustion and drowned beneath that silent, thundering metronome from the endless city. The rhythm builds until your fingers are subconsciously searching for whatever surface they can find to tap against- back and forth, in and out, up and down, one and two- and there’s that feeling again like you’re splitting in half. Your fingertips turn red and raw with abuse. The pain helps keep you awake.

You’re walking around the meteor and bleeding out from the center. Dark, flashing spots dance at the edges of your vision, only to vanish when you turn your head. You’ve started hearing things that aren’t there, voices and fragmented bits of conversation like you’re walking through a crowded room. Your mind wanders away, tries to pull you along with it, conjures images and sounds that make your body jump and your heart race when you recognize the Texas skyline or the inside of your shitty, run-down apartment. Sleep has been creeping towards you regardless of whether or not your eyes are shut, but you won’t let the images take hold, because the next time your brother catches you there, he’ll kill you.

You don’t remember how you got to your room. Someone could have taken you there and made you lie down, or you might have found your way there intentionally, but here you are, lying on your back, in your bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to remember where you’ve been for the past few hours, but the memories won’t come. You’d forget everything if you could, toss the last few months into the void and walk out of your room like none of this ever happened, back to pestering Rose and fucking around with Karkat and Terezi like death wasn’t waiting for you at the tip of a sword.

There was a time when you knew who your brother was, and you never imagined that anything in the universe could complicate that memory of him. Whether it’s him from the past or an alternate timeline version, he’s still your Bro, and he’s made it very clear that he wants you dead. There were times when you might not have gotten along like the picturesque family the rest of society expected from children and the people who raised them, but you never doubted that he loved you. He had a strange way of showing it, but you understood the message, even when the method of delivery might have been obscure and convoluted. It was just one of those things you accepted about him, because you’d known him your entire life. The way other (allegedly “normal”) people did things was frequently the more difficult of the two concepts for you to understand. John’s family dynamic in particular always seemed especially bizarre, even though Jade once said that out of the four of you, his was the most normal. It wasn’t _your_ normal, but you never gave a damn about what the world expected. Bro was your normal, the apartment was your home, and there isn’t a day that goes by that you don’t miss him terribly, in spite of everything that’s happened.

“Thought I told you t’pack it up and go to bed.” He grumbles, dumping a handful of dishes in the sink and turning on the faucet with a flick of his wrist. You smash the button on the controller, refusing to let Mike Tyson’s pixelated face be the last thing you see for the fifth time in a row.

“I’m not tired yet.”

“Don’t care. You’ve got a doctor’s appointment in the morning.”

“Yeah, it’s not like I have to be awake for that. Dude’s just gonna stick me with a needle and call it a day, all I have to do is sit there and look pretty.”

He’s silent for a few minutes while the dishes clatter around in the sink, and you do your best impression of a bored teenager playing a video game. He finishes and shuts off the tap, then walks into your line of sight and stands with his arms crossed, doing his best impression of a silently displeased drill sergeant.

“Not gonna drag yer ass out a’ bed tomorrow, kid.”

“Sounds good to me, I’m all for staying home and not becoming a human pincushion.”

“You’d rather become a statistic?”

“This might come as a shock to you, Bro, but I’m not a huge fan of getting poked with needles.”

“Dave, I don’t care if you ...” _want to get your ass jabbed or not,_ your mind fills in as he trails off suddenly, and it’s a bizarre feeling like sitting in a moving vehicle as someone slams the brakes, a halted momentum, the spinning top as it falls over. He blinks, then looks down at his gloved hands with a frown, turning them over slowly like he’s never seen his own fingers before.

“Bro, what’s wrong?” You ask tentatively, trying to get his attention because he’s starting to freak you out, but when finally he looks up at you, it’s like he’s staring at a stranger. He’s motionless for a moment, before suddenly turning and making a beeline for the bathroom down the hall. Alarmed by his behavior, you get up and follow him, game controller forgotten on the futon. 

He gets there well before you do, and you turn the corner to see him leaning towards the mirror over the sink with his hands on the tiled countertop, hat held in one and pointed shades in the other, staring into his reflection like it’s the barrel of a loaded rifle.

“Bro ...?”

His head turns when you speak, but you don’t keep his attention for more than a second or two, before his eyes quickly return to the mirror. He drops both accessories on the tiled counter and lifts a hand to trail his fingertips over the blonde stubble along his jawline, then into his hair, leaving it sticking up awkwardly in the wake of his fingers. You make an unsure sound, about to try saying something else to him, before he abruptly turns and walks past you back into the living room, and you’re left to trail uncertainly after him. He heads straight for your bedroom door and opens it, staring into your room wordlessly.

You’re more or less of out of things to say that you haven’t already said, so you wait cautiously behind him, leaning against the futon, for whatever crazy psychotic episode he’s having to end, but your thoughts seem to be pulling you in two completely different directions as you study the back of his white-clad shoulders. You remember going to bed after he got pissed with you, and then dragging your feet to the doctor’s office the next morning. This wasn’t part of what happened. It’s almost like you’re out of place, or wearing the wrong outfit for the occasion, and as soon as the concept takes hold in your mind, something shifts against your skin, and you’re back to wearing red again.

The game, the apocalypse, Bro’s death, everything comes back like you’ve just woken up and remembered who you are, all in the long stretch of seconds while Bro stares at the inside of your room from the open door. When he finally turns around and sees you, sitting on the back of the futon in your red god tier outfit, his expression doesn’t change. No sign of surprise or curiosity, even for him. You learned by necessity as a child how to read the tiny shifts in his stone-cold facade, and he should at least be registering the fact that you don’t look the way you used to.

Except neither does he. There’s something off about the way he’s been looking at you, and it’s reflected in the tone of his voice when he finally speaks.

“This is your room.” He says flatly. You lift an eyebrow, feigning nonchalance while inside you’re floundering to make sense of what’s happening.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve lived here your whole life.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I’m your brother.”

“...Yes?”

“Your name is Dave Strider.”

“Yeah, that’s my name.” 

Oh.

_Oh, shit._

“Dirk.” You whisper, every fiber in your being responding to the tactile memory of being shoved to the ground with a sword twisted into your shirt. The empty space between the two of you might as well be a pit of rotating knives, the way you scramble away from him and retreat behind the futon. Your hands have lifted of their own accord halfway into a defensive position- not quite all the way, but you’re ready to pull an evasive maneuver if you have to. He watches your frantic reaction somewhat impassively, before silently looking down at himself again. You know how that feels, playing someone else’s part in the wrong body, and you wonder how long he’s been here, how much of your conversation with your Bro he participated in, unable to stop himself from reading the lines. Kanaya was right. Whatever is happening, whatever fucked-up mechanism is bringing the two of you together, it’s not just you going through this anymore.

“You’re dreaming this too, aren’t you?” He looks up at the sound of your voice. “You said so before, I remember.”

“Yeah.” He says, and that’s it. It’s a bizarre standoff, you on one side of the living room and him on the other, in the body of your Bro, with the futon between you, and your video game silently flashing colors over the screen (“CONTINUE?” in large red letters, you didn’t pause it before you got up to follow him). He doesn’t seem interested in interacting with you after that, moving slowly along the side of the room as your feet reflexively shift to match his changing position, but all he does is touch the edge of the pictures hanging on the wall. It’s a series of shitty drawings you did back when you were in grade school, nothing but concept sketches for a comic, but Bro somehow found it, and the next thing you knew, it was hanging in the living room. You never did figure out whether he meant it as an ironic gesture or not, but Dirk stares at them like there’s something important happening in his head, and you’re completely left out of it.

It’s a strange situation, confusing as fuck, and wrong in all kinds of ways, but something settles in the pit of your stomach as you watch him move slowly around the room. He’s keeps one eye on you, but seems mostly preoccupied with exploring, and you watch him move into the kitchen, glancing over the grade school scribbles and cheap dollar store magnets covering the refrigerator, then opening the door of one cupboard before shutting it against the pile of knives and swords inside. He makes it all the way around the room, and you’re left standing for most of it, before deciding ‘fuck it’ (against the survival instinct in your brain screaming at you to stay on your guard), and sitting down on the futon where you were originally when the memory started. Dirk makes his way over to one of the windows to stare out at the city through the glass before muttering something.

You don’t want to ask, to interact with him any more than you have to, and there’s an awkward, too-long pause before you direct an equally awkward “what?” in his direction.

“It’s blurry.” He says, still staring out the window. “Everything’s out of focus.”

You shrug, forgetting for a moment that he can’t see it. “It’s a dream memory. They get blurry when you fuck them up.”

He finally turns around to look at you, and it’s actually him this time, not your Bro. The memory of the last time you met comes back again in full force at the sight of him, and you resist the urge to flee the room before he tries to hurt you again, but he doesn’t. His shades are still gone, forgotten on the bathroom counter, and you’re not prepared for the sudden twist of painful, contradictory emotions that comes with seeing his face. He stares at you too, everything in his features wrenching you back and forth between _I missed you so much, I thought I’d never see you again, please don’t leave me_ and _you psychotic fucking asshole, do you have any idea what you’ve done to me, I died from a seizure trying to stay awake_ , but then he finally opens his mouth, and you’re unprepared for the soft confusion in his voice.

“I don’t understand.”


End file.
